Difference between Silverlight and WPF

 

Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) are 2 different products from Microsoft, but has lot of overlap. Silverlight is a sub set of WPF in terms of features and functionality.

Silverlight is a Microsoft technology, competing with Adobes Flash and is meant for developing rich browser based internet applications.

Silverlight is on the web. What you create is an application that can be hosted either in an html page or an asp.net page. To watch it from your browser it requires to have installed in your browser the Silverlight plug-in. Silverlight uses very fewer libraries than WPF does, and that's pretty logical because Silverlight's CLR is in the plug-in which is about 5-10 MB.

WPF is a Microsoft technology meant for developing enhanced graphics applications for desktop platform. In addition, WPF applications can be hosted on web browsers which offers rich graphics features for web applications. Web Browser Applications (WBA) developed on WPF technology uses XAML to host user interface for browser applications. XAML stands for eXtended Application Markup Language which is a new declarative programming model from Microsoft. XAML files are hosted as discrete files in the Web server, but are downloaded to the browsers and converted to user interface by the .NET runtime in the client browsers.

WPF runs on .NET runtime and developers can take advantage of the rich .NET Framework and WPF libraries to build really cool windows applications. WPF supports 3-D graphics, complex animations, hardware acceleration etc.

WPF is for desktop applications- you create an .exe file when you build WPF applications. To run a WPF exe requires you to have Framework 3 or higher on your pc.

WPF and Silverlight though use the same logic in development and the same technology.

Summary:

1. Silverlight is simply a subset of WPF.
2. Silverlight is meant to be used online, while WPF is for local use.
3. You can use Silverlight applications regardless of the operating system you use, while WPF applications are restricted to later versions of the Windows operating system.
4. Silverlight lacks access to local resources, while WPF can utilize local resources.
5. Silverlight only has perspective 3D support, while WPF is capable of full 3D images.